Describe Your Fiction Writing Process.

Oh, man, I haven't thought of this in a while (haven't been creative in a while, either, hmmm).

It kind of depends (don't I always say that? :-D).

Sometimes, I have a pretty specific plan - beginning, middle, end, get here, get here, get here. Other times, I have a specific scene in mind and then end up draping the story around it.

Still other times, I get a character or characters in mind and then kind of let them duke it out and see where they take me. I sort of "listen" to them (no, I don't hear voices), in the sense that it's sort of - Jane says this, no, she doesn't, she says it this different way, and then Tom says the next thing, etc. And the scene just kind of plays out in my head and I more or less just record what I've "witnessed" (is this making any sense?).

Occasionally, I get an idea from a dream. The story I've written here, called "The End", came from a dream I had wherein I saw millions of shooting stars in the sky but then the sky went black. I woke up agitated and determined to find a way to get that scene fitted somehow into a story (this is the draping process I mention above). It was around that scene that I created the story.

At times, I am so obsessed with what I'm doing that I will often wake up and immediately write things down, no matter what time of night it is. I keep a paper and pen at bedside for this very reason. I won't be able to get back to sleep if I don't write whatever it is down, although I find sometimes I have trouble deciphering my scrawls later in the day.

Sofia, you may have seen my thread about writing a romance novel -- it's a silly thing, but definitely getting my creative writing juices flowing. (Er, perhaps an unfortunate phrase in context...)

I started out with a hook -- this often happens to me, that one specific idea comes out of pretty much nowhere and then I have to figure out what to do with it. I tried to figure out what to do with the hook, what would be the best way to use it. Then I thought it could be a good cornerstone of a romance. I'm really looking for ways to make money these days, and thought I'd remembered that getting a romance novel published was relatively straightforward, and opened a thread here to ask about it. Got lots of GREAT advice and leads (special thanks to ehBeth), and have been working on it fairly intensively for the last week or so.

So it started with the hook, then layers over that; what are the characters like? What is the dramatic arc of the story? What leads to what? How will it end? How do I thread the story together so that the ending is satisfying? Each thing kind of leads to another... so, if there is going to be conflict, this has to happen. Which means she has to have a little more of this kind of personality. Etc. It's pretty organic, the rough outline becoming more and more nuanced as I work on it. Now the story is whole enough in my head that it's getting into "Well, she would never do that" territory, as the characters take on a life of their own.

I'm getting a little TOO attached to my story and characters -- thinking "this is too good to waste on a romance novel" -- but the whole point is that I don't have the time for the kind of "real" literature I would love to do, and this is turning out to be absolutely fantastic practice, anyway. I always tend to obsess over my "real" writing, to the point of not even getting started -- oh, that's cliched, that's SO been done, that's an awkward sentence, the pacing sucks -- and just gallivanting along with no particular expectations of quality is proving to be really liberating for me. Some genuinely good stuff is sneaking through.

Definitely is the kind of thing that I think of something as I drift off to sleep and repeat it 25 times so I'll be sure to remember it in the morning, and then first thing in the morning I jump up and write it down. All of my favorite writing has come from this kind of compunction, like it's just there and I'm the conduit.

FABULOUS, ON TARGET RESPONSES!!

Thanks to both of you.

I've started with a hook before, as well, sozobe--a selling point, to me. For me, my choice to do that was more about marketing the book/short story, rather than being true to the characters. Conversely, when I focus on 'following the characters, the story gets unweildy and goes on relentlessly... It seems Jes and sozobe have learned balance-- I guess I need to follow a sensible path, and do a rough outline. I just got all 'freestyle' and wanted to see what would happen if I 'listened' to my characters, rather than pre-ordained where they'd be going. Art vs. marketing-->ARGGH!

I really appreciate the two of you sharing your styles.

Oh, don't knock "freestyling". A lot of good stuff can come out of that. One of my very favorite stories came out of a story that I was struggling and struggling with, I was trying to send it in one direction and it kept going in another, and finally I just went with the tangent and ditched where it came from. The tangent turned out to be the thing.

Oh, I definitely freestyle. And I find I get in trouble with it. Oy, I've got reams and reams (literally) of unfinished stuff. The characters get unwieldy. The plot gets thicker and deeper and I can't figure out how to wrap it all up in a non-trite manner. I get bored with the scenario (it's bad when your own writing bores you). :-D

Anyway - I've found the collaborative process to be extremely helpful in terms of keeping things moving, although sometimes it's derailing. I used to try to collaborate with a friend, and he got so hung up on things like characters' names I threw up my hands in frustration. I started naming everyone in the story shorty names like Bob and Sue just to get past that and move onto the actual process. But to no avail, and we never finished anything beyond an outline.

I've done some online collaborating (actually, soz and I have collaborated, with blatham, Lola and hiama - I can't recall if there were others involved). It was great fun and the story turned out very coherent and funny. Tough to recreate the first magical stuff. Hmm. I would love to do it again but gawd, my life is getting mondo busy.

I found the screenplay! I found the screenplay!

I was worried I wouldn't. That's definitely for the "saved Abuzz threads" folder.

http://nytimes.abuzz.com/interaction/s.250704/discussion

(This is what Jes was referring to, Sofia.)

Well . . .
Pretty much all of my stories start out with a very basic idea, along the lines of the "What if?" school of thought, and from there, I just decide where to actually go with that single, initial idea; as for characters, I usually just make them to suit the story more than make the story to suit them. However, almost without exception, I make sure I do not write a single word down for at least a few months, because an idea acted upon too quickly comes out half-baked and spoiled. I've had lots of good ideas that turned into mediocre stories simply because I rushed them to production.

-Cricket

Good point, Cricket (Tang? Welcome either way.) If you let things marinate a bit, the whole thing tends to be more organic and whole when it does emerge.

I am not really a writer, but I took a cool creative writing class in college. One technique the teacher used to get us creative was this. He'd collect from each of us a noun and an adjective, put them into 2 seperate hats and then have us draw one of each from the hats. We'd use this as our title and build the story around it. It was quite fun and my best 2 stories were developed by this method.

I definitely have found that the more constraints I have, the better I write, which is counterintuitive. I alluded to why above... I just go in 10 zillion directions at once and tend to think that everything is an OK but kinda dumb idea. If my hands are tied and I have to explore an OK but kinda dumb idea, I finally let go of that and am able to come up with something decent.

These are all great responses. I will check the screenplay link, soz, thanks.

I think there is merit to the 'marinating' idea Tang shared. This is what I've been trying to do--get to know the characters in mee haid before committing anything to paper.

But--dammit--now I'm having a crisis. Before, I loved the idea of my characters moving through some neat growth periods--everyone is coming to varying points of new self-awareness, and new perceptions of old false notions about life-- and now, I am worried its too boring.

Now, I guess I need to find a hook.

Funny.

Sozobe-- I have the problem you talked about-- I could go on ad infinitum and the story loses shape, and I don't know where I'm going... But, the really cool thing is sometimes, as I think you said previously, the tangent is the thing! Maybe that's how we do our intensive backgrounding work. We write it in the story--with descriptive dialogue and detailed action--then, we go off on our tangent far enough that we find our material for what we want to say.

Do you ask yourself--"What am I trying to say?"

I try not to, because I try NOT to "say" anything. I try not to write things with morals or messages. I am more interested in plumbing the depths of the character, seeing what feels right, being as subtle and realistic as possible. One of my favorite things is to write something that contains all of the information to arrive at a judgement without any signposts, and then having different people being sure that the story is saying completely different things. I wrote a story in college that came from a female point of view, but I thought thoroughly about the male point of view, and kept adjusting and adjusting, and in the discussion the women were all sure it meant one thing and the men were all sure it meant something else.

Does that make any sense?

Yes! I think I must be hearing the voice of my composition teacher, when I shouldn't be. "What is your theme...what is your central idea?" You are right. I remember thinking in previous query letters--I felt a need to give a clear one or two sentence synopsis about the central idea of the book/screenplay/short-story.

But, you're right. If I give the 'central theme' so much effort in the writing, it would be easy to come off heavy-handed--with a moral or message--even if I don't intend that.

Thanks. The dialogue with you is really helping!

The single greatest impediment to me ever writing anything is that I suck at coming up with names. I try to leave the names blank till I come up with something but it nags at me till I give up.

You bee crazy! You could give them names of actors or actresses that 'look like' your character, and change the names when you're done!

Good God, that slays me. Names, your greatest impediment! <grumble* grouse* grumble* indignant fume with slitted eyes*> I guess you were jespah's infuriating no-name-having foil. Tis funna.

I do give them names that I plan to later substitute but they nag at me.

"He doesn't look like a Benjamin Dover!"

"But I haven't even decided WHAT he looks like yet!"

"Why don't we stop now before we end up saying something we regret."

I work from characters. Once I know everything about them, they tell the story. They really do. Everything you thought you were going to say flies out the window and these suddenly real people do what they meant to do all along.

Why don't we stop now before we end up saying something we regret."

I start with an minimal idea in my head, then i research research and research, following that I write freestyle.